Gesture - Volume 15, Issue 2, 2016

Relying on the analysis of naturally occurring interaction recordings, this article proposes the moment-by-moment description of a specific type of focused interaction, the interaction of the martial art Aikido. In Aikido encounters, participants exchange moves of attack, defense, avoidance also using a “weapon”. These “Aikido movements”, as I shall call them, are articulated by the whole body and serve as projectable interactional units. Aikido movements appear as highly ordered minimal units of the practitioners’ activity which are coordinated between them in space and time. Central in this account is the description of the interactional space elaborated through the moving transactional segments of the practitioners. I suggest that the description of the visible bodily actions of Aikido opens a range of questions concerning the social and interactional construction of human perception in any activity involving whole body movements. As visible actions, Aikido movement and gesture share the property of becoming units of the social activity they organize.

A comparison of size gestures made during object descriptions by Anyi speakers from the Ivory Coast and Dutch speakers in the Netherlands reveals considerable formational differences. Firstly, whereas all Anyi speakers make use of body parts to depict size and shape, none of the Dutch speakers do. Secondly, Dutch gestures outlining a size and shape in space are more varied than their Anyi counterparts in the number and distribution of the different handshapes, orientations, and movements. In addition, we report comparisons among Anyi speakers in which body parts are used as a way of showing the size of objects with signs for sizes employed in the sign language used by deaf and hearing signers in Adamorobe, a village community in Ghana that is linguistically and culturally related to the Anyi communities in Côte d’Ivoire. This comparison reveals significant similarities as well as differences, suggesting how co-speech gestures may have been adapted for use in this sign language.

The study describes certain structural modifications employed on the citation forms of ISL during signing for intensification purposes. In Signed Languages, citation forms are considered relatively immune to modifications. Nine signers signed several scenarios describing some intense quality. The signers used conventional adverbs existing in ISL for intensification purposes. Yet, they also employed idiosyncratic modifications on the formational components of adjectives simultaneously to form realization. These optional modifications enriched the messages conveyed merely by the conventional forms. They show that signers can incorporate gradient modes of expressions directly into the production of the lexical items to communicate more diverse and explicit messages in context. Using a comparative semiotic approach allowed us to describe the synergetic cooperation manifested at the stage of utterance construction between formational elements which were more suited to convey gradient and analog meanings in context and those that were less suited and thus not modified.

Great apes do not possess language or any comparable system of symbolic communication. Yet they communicate intentionally and possess cognitive competencies like categorization and decontextualization. These provide the basis for mental concepts and the meaning side of linguistic symbols. The arbitrarily linked and conventionalized forms for expressing these meanings, however, seem to be largely missing. We propose two strategies that may allow great apes to communicate a wide array of meanings without creating numerous arbitrarily linked forms. First, we suggest the existence of ‘population-specific semantic shifts’: within a population a communicative signal’s meaning is modified without changing its form, resulting in a new ‘vocabulary item’. Second, we propose that great apes, in addition to possessing sophisticated inferential abilities, intentionally display behaviors without overt communicative intent to provide eavesdropping conspecifics with ‘natural meaning’ (in the Gricean sense) and thus to influence their behavior.

The age-old debate between the proponents of the gesture-first and speech-first positions has returned to occupy a central place in current language evolution theorizing. The gestural scenarios, suffering from the problem known as “modality transition” (why a gestural system would have changed into a predominantly spoken system), frequently appeal to the gestures of the orofacial area as a platform for this putative transition. Here, we review currently available evidence on the significance of the orofacial area in language evolution. While our review offers some support for orofacial movements as an evolutionary “bridge” between manual gesture and speech, we see the evidence as far more consistent with a multimodal approach. We also suggest that, more generally, the “gestural versus spoken” formulation is limiting and would be better expressed in terms of the relative input and interplay of the visual and vocal-auditory sensory modalities.